Stillness Big Year: After 100 Headspaces, do I like Headspace?

For the first hundred days of 2018, I’ve done all this Big Year asks of me – just ten minutes each day listening to a session on the Headspace app. Am I still a fan?

The first thing that has to be said is that meditation, of whatever form and duration, is clearly most individualistic. Some people long for constant mindfulness. Others, and I count myself among them, retain a healthy shot of cynicism. To be blunt, most of the time I don’t wish to be chilled out and peaceful. Bring on the fizzing mind, I say.

Nonetheless, one aspect of Headspace stressed by the founder (and voice) of Headspace – the pleasure in taking a moment out of the frenetic day – is something I’m definitely noticing. I look forward to my 600 seconds of “time out.”

But of course meditation is meant to lead to far more than a sense of time off, far more than the relief of a glass of wine at the end of the day. It’s meant to change one’s life. Has that happened to me? I can’t say it has. After the first thirty days of introductory work, I’ve been gradually working through various modules and each one of them teaches a different technique. For example, the Restlessness module offers a visualization of slowly filling up with light. My current module, Motivation, inserts a major philosophical “question to oneself” every day. In spite of instructions to take each lesson out into the hurly-burly of the everyday, I rarely remember to do so. For me, Headspace remains a daily trinket.

Yet I must conclude on a note of optimism. Even though I haven’t internalised each Headspace technique, the steady drip-drip of the routine might yet lead me to taking “the next step” during 2018. I do remember every nifty technique. Whenever I choose, at random, to use one at my writing desk or out in the world, it seems to have a beneficial impact. Perhaps, after another 265 sessions, I shall transform into mindfulness incarnate. Perhaps . . .